BAGHDAD, IRAQ – U.S. and Iraqi forces moved in on the high-rise apartment building before dawn, after getting a tip that one of Iraq’s most-wanted insurgents was inside.

Gunmen inside opened fire, and when the battle was over, officials say the second-ranking al-Qaida figure in the country, Abdullah Abu Azzam, was dead.

American and Iraqi officials Tuesday called it a major blow against the group known as al-Qaida in Iraq, saying they had eliminated the mastermind of an escalation in suicide bombings that has killed nearly 700 people in Baghdad since April in the months before a vote on the new constitution.

“Things that (leader Abu Musab al-) Zarqawi cannot do because of his profile, Azzam was able to do. His impact reached far beyond Baghdad and actually had impact on operations throughout Iraq,” military spokesman Brig. Gen. Donald Alston told the BBC.

But the long-term effect was unclear.

Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said “it will have some impact, but over time they will replace people.”

Violence has continued unabated since Sunday, with at least 66 people killed, including four U.S. troops. In the most recent attacks, a suicide attacker blew himself up Tuesday in a police recruitment center in Baqouba, north of the capital, killing nine people, and gunmen in Baghdad killed four policemen.

U.S. Marines on Tuesday intercepted a man who had driven his explosives-packed vehicle into the capital’s heavily fortified Green Zone and reached within a mile of the U.S. Embassy.

The attacker was stopped and arrested, but the discovery raised concerns about security in what is supposed to be the best protected site in the capital, where U.S. and Iraqi government buildings and residences are located.

In southern Iraq, police found the decomposed bodies of 22 men who had been shot to death and dumped in a field, many of them bound and blindfolded, said police Lt. Othman al-Lami of the Wasit provincial police. He said the victims appeared to have been killed more than a month ago. The district – northeast of Kut, about 100 miles southeast of Baghdad – is mostly Shiite.

Al-Qaida in Iraq denied the U.S. and Iraqi claims that Abu Azzam was the No. 2 figure in the organization, calling it “a futile attempt … to raise the morale of their troops.”

“Abu Azzam was one of al-Qaida’s many soldiers and is the leader of one of its battalions operating in Baghdad,” the group said in an Internet statement by its spokesman, Abu Maysara al-Iraqi.

But U.S. and Iraqi officials said Abu Azzam had led al-Qaida’s operations in Baghdad since April. He also controlled financing for foreign fighters, they said.

According to an Associated Press tally, 698 people have been killed and 1,579 have been wounded in suicide attacks in Baghdad since April 1.

Among them was a string of blasts on Sept. 14 that killed some 160 people, Baghdad’s highest one-day death toll from violence. In that day’s most lethal bombing, a man lured laborers into a van, promising work, then detonated it, killing 112 people.

Iraqi government spokesman Laith Kubba warned that insurgents would likely carry out revenge attacks. He said Abu Azzam “was supervising on a daily basis almost all the attacks that happened (in Baghdad). … He was fully responsible for preparing and sending the car bombs that killed hundreds of innocent Iraqis.”

Abu Azzam was killed in a gunbattle that broke out when he opened fire on troops raiding his hideout in a high-rise apartment building in southeast Baghdad before dawn Sunday, said Lt. Col. Steve Boylan, a U.S. spokesman.

The raid came after a tip from an Iraqi civilian, and another militant was captured in the apartment, Kubba said.

Abu Azzam – whose real name was Abdullah Najim Abdullah Mohammed Al-Jawari – was previously al-Qaida’s “amir” or leader in western Anbar province, the heartland of the insurgency, the U.S. military said. He was then sent to Baghdad and was “responsible for the recent upsurge in violent attacks in the city,” the military said.

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